Business Life - The Town That Walt Built

8/11/2019 Business Life - The Town That Walt Built

1/6SEPTEMBER 2014business life

Town planningA model in the Disneyoffices showing the newtown of Val dEuropein the foreground and

Disneyland Paris beyond

ght


2/6

JEROMECHATIN/EXPANSION-REA

37

TAKE A DRIVE 30KM TO

the east of Paris and youll find

a traditional French landscape: the

sleepy villages with their cafs, boulodromes

and boulangeries; rolling fields of beet. And then

comes the new town of Val dEurope and

you notice that something is different.

For starters, it is a vision of brightness: the

buildings in the town centre have been designed

in a classic 19th-century Parisian style, but are

cream-coloured to make them look less gloomy

in winter. To increase light at street level, the

largest buildings are no taller than five storeys.

The squares are smaller than those in other

town centres so that passers-by dont feel lost,

and mothers have no trouble pushing their prams

down the streets, because the pavements are

extra wide.

These innovative touches are far from

accidental. This is a new town designed bya company with a 60-year track record of

creating the worlds most cutting-edge leisure

developments: Walt Disney.

The American media giant isnt renowned for

pioneering real estate development, but in fact

this has been at the heart of its theme park

strategy for decades. The companys founder,

Walt Disney, was so fascinated by town planning

that he commissioned the construction of an

experimental city in Florida that was due to have

20,000 residents, who would be ferried around

by monorails while road traffic was keptunderground in order to protect pedestrians.

The plan died along with Disney himself in 1966

The townthat Walt

built

When you think of Disney theme parks,roller coasters and cuddly characterscome to mind. But, as Christian Sylt

reports, the business model at thecompanys outpost in Paris is also

based on a far more mundane

revenue stream: property.Welcome to

business life SEPTEMBER 2014

4mins



and instead the company built a science-based

theme park in Florida known as EPCOT

(Experimental Prototype Community of

Tomorrow). Elements of the original plans

were revisited in 1994, when Disney opened

Celebration, a more traditional new town that

sits next to its colossal theme park complex in

Florida. Val dEurope, on the other hand, arose

almost out of necessity.

New towns began to emerge in France at the

end of the 1960s at the instigation of president

Charles de Gaulle, as a counter to haphazard

urban growth. The entire area where Val

dEurope stands today was earmarked for

development, with the five villages alreadysitting on the land set to be interlinked into it.

Those plans were frozen following the 1973 oil

crisis, but they werent forgotten.

In the 1980s, Disney began negotiating with

the French government about building a resort

in Paris, and one of its objectives was to acquire

far more land than the space on which its two

theme parks would sit. This strategy stemmed

from the time when Walt Disney bought land

for his original Disneyland park in California

and, soon after it opened in 1955, motels and

restaurants began springing up next to it,

spoiling the fantasy theming of the resort.

To prevent a repeat of this in France, Disney

asked for a vast plot of land almost a fifth the

size of Paris. It got what it wanted, but it came

with a catch. The government agreed to sell

the land to Disney provided that the majority of

it was developed in accordance with its own

vision. Disney was allocated a total of 2,230

hectares and the principle was for it to develop

all of it. However, the government would only

release the land to Disney in stages, once

previous plots were completed.

The project was the first public-privatepartnership in the history of French national

and regional development and it came with a

unique challenge. Given that Disney is as

American as apple pie, the first priority was

to reassure locals that the area wouldnt be

Americanised or Disney-fied. An association,

known as the Syndicat dAgglomration

Nouvelle (SAN), of the five ancient villages

was set up and operates with Disney and

the French new town agency Epafrance/

Epamarne. Residents soon understood that the

common interest of all the players was theoptimum development of the local area.

Communal services, such as parks and

ght

PHILIPPEMOULU/HE

MIS/ARCAIDIMAGES.C

OM;EMILELUIDER/COSMOS/E

YEVINE


4/639business life SEPTEMBER 2014

Design for livingPlace dAriane of fers a

mixture of flats, hotels,offices, shops, cafes and

restaurants. Its focalpoint is a brasserie

designed by Lon Krier(right, above). Place deToscane (right, below)is loosely based on the

oval shape of theamphitheatre inLucca, Tuscany

DISNEY ASKED

FOR A PLOT OF

LAND ALMOST A

FIFTH THE SIZE OF

PARIS



transport, are managed by the SAN, which also

finances schools, sports centres and other public

facilities through taxes on on-site hotels and

businesses. Disney is the largest contributor and

has paid more than $1bn of tax into the local area.

It is a powerful economic engine.

Disneyland Paris has 14,244 staff, making it the

biggest employer in eastern Paris, and it has the

fifth largest concentration of hotels in France. It

is Europes most-visited tourist attraction (14.9m

guests last year) and has nearly three times the

attendance of its closest rival, Germanys Europa

Park. An economic study published in 2012 by

an inter-ministerial delegation revealed that in the

20 years since Disneyland Paris opened in 1992it had generated 50bn of added value to the

French economy and 6.2 per cent of foreign

exchange income.

Disneys business model for Val dEurope is

simple it buys land from the government and

sells it to companies who fund its development

after Disney has signed off the design. Last year,

real estate development provided 20.4m in

revenue, which comprises just 1.6 per cent of the

1.3bn turnover of the resorts parent company

Euro Disney. It is a small sum, but it can

sometimes prove significant.

In 2010, when the economic downturn was at

its worst, attendance at Disneyland Paris fell by

2.6 per cent, leading to its theme park revenues

dropping 2.9m to 685.3m. But Euro Disneys

overall revenue got a 3.7 per cent

boost from the sale of the land

underlying Val dEuropes

125,000 square metre

shopping mall to Paris-listed

real estate firm Klpierre

and French insurer Axa.

Disneys involvement with

Val dEurope has also served astrategic purpose. The original five

historic villages only had 4,000 residents

combined, whereas the total now stands at

28,593 and is projected to soar to 60,000

by 2030. The site is home to a total of

28,000 jobs and, surprisingly, Disney staff

only make up around ten per cent of the

towns residents. Other businesses have been

the biggest driving force and this is highlighted by

the results of a 2012 study by accountancy firm

KPMG. It revealed that four to five companies

are opening in Val dEurope every week, givinga current total of approximately 2,300. In 2011

alone more than 2.44m square metres of office

space was sold.

Much of it is clustered in a business

centre run by leading European

developer Goodman International.

It is no ordinary business park,

and looks more like a Californian

university campus than an industrial

zone. Disney chose to sell to Goodman,which has other parks in Shanghai and

Barcelona, because of its focus on landscaping

and amenities such as restaurants, fitness rooms,

dry cleaning services and child care facilities.

According to KPMG, the key reason for Val

dEuropes popularity as a location for businesses

is that the taxes and rent are far cheaper there

than local alternatives. Rent in particular is 60 per

cent cheaper at Val dEurope than in the main

Paris business district of La Dfense.

Transport convenience is also a key factor, as

Val dEurope is the location of Frances busiestTGV rail hub, with 70 trains per day. Charles de

Gaulle, the leading airport in Paris, is just eight

Retail heavenThe Val dEuropeshopping mallincludes 140 shops,

16 restaurants andeven an aquarium

FOUR OR FIVE

COMPANIES

OPEN IN VAL

DEUROPE

EVERY WEEK

ghtght

PHILIPPEMOULU/HEMIS/ARCAIDIMAGES.C

OM;

EMILELUIDER/COSMOS/EYEVINE


6/6

minutes away by TGV and there are direct slip

roads to the main A4 motorway.

Disney itself doesnt design the buildings: that

was left to American design bureau Cooper

Robertson & Partners. Foreign consultants also

had a hand in giving the town some European

flair. The central caf was conceived by Belgian

Lon Krier, who is an architectural advisor to

the Prince of Wales, whilst Italian Pier Carlo

Bontempi came up with the idea for the oval-

shaped square, Place de Toscane. However, it

takes a sprinkling of Disneys magic dust to

achieve the end result.

Disneys ingenious theme park attractions are

designed by so-called imagineers, a term formedfrom a combination of the words imagination and

engineering, and they also had a hand in the

planning of Val dEurope. Even the tiniest details

have been thought through.

The most immediately apparent decision is the

use of 19th-century-style architecture, which was

chosen over modern designs so that it will stand

the test of time. There is no difference from the

outside between the social and private housing,

and the imagineers even came up with a way of

easing the transition between the city and

residential areas: cross-breed neighbourhoods

made up of lower buildings and small houses.

Buildings have three distinct sections top,

faade and podium and they are used to

create a style for all properties in a particular

neighbourhood. For example, all podiums in the

main square, Place dAriane, are freestone but

no two are identical.

Integration between new and existing residents

is also a key concern, so shopping areas and parks

have been created between the old villages, the

business parks and the new residential districts.

A quarter of the land has to be set aside for

nature reserve, which means that, on completion,residents will benefit from 115 hectares of green

space, including 28 landscaped water features.

The next major development is a carbon neutral

nature resort, which will open in 2016 and is being

designed by Disney in partnership with holiday

park operator Pierre&Vacances.

In addition to the theme parks, Val dEurope

residents can enjoy sailing, cycling, tennis, fishing

and tenpin bowling facilities, as well as a 27-hole

golf course, 15-screen cinema and a discount

outlet retail park with shops set into small

cottage-style buildings. Even this was deliberate.The goods on offer are last years lines, so the

operators know which are bestsellers and the

flexible structure allows for shops to extend

their floorspace accordingly.Many of the other facilities would normally be

found in large cities, such as a university campus,

four middle schools, 12 nursery schools and an

international high school with teaching entirely

in foreign languages.

Since the opening of Disneyland Paris, Disney

has contributed 5bn to the development of Val

dEurope, compared to 500m from the French

government, so it has been a win-win for the

state. It is now hard to imagine that just over 20

years ago there was barren land where Val

dEurope stands today, and that is perhaps thestrongest evidence that Disney really can create

happy endings.n

Reach for the skySleeping Beauty Castle atDisneyland Paris, which is

Europes most visitedtourist attraction

ght

SEPTEMBER 2014 business life

On

theMoney

The

deathofcash

SUPERSTOCK

Documents

Business Life - The Town That Walt Built